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Promising Drug to Prevent AIDS New Infections

In order to help people not to catch HIV while they have sex with an infected partner, specialists are making tests on AIDS treatment drugs.

According to a study, there was no contagion between gay people who took a two-pill combo drug, either daily or just before and after sex with someone infested. Another study showed that the men who were not infected, they did not take the virus while they had sex only with partners whose HIV was controlled by drugs.

The studies were discussed in Amsterdam at the International AIDS conference on Tuesday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, scientist at The United States’ top AIDS, called the results “very impressive” and “really striking.”

More or less than 36 million people around the world have HIV and about 1.8 million new infections appear every year.

Condoms are the best prevention for HIV, but as long as not everyone uses them or they do not use them all the time, new options are needed.

The drug is sold as Truvada by Gilead Science. A two-drug combo shown that can prevent infection when one of the partner has the virus and doesn’t know. The strongest successes were for male-female couples.

A real-world test was made with around 1,600 gay men in the Paris region. They were at a high risk of getting infected, because of reticence to use condoms or other cause. They were given the drugs either for daily use or on demand.

After a year, when the people were tested, no infection was found.

After the first test, they made another one. They kept an infected partner severely suppressed with HIV medicines, which is known to decrease the risk of spreading it. After 18 months, none of the infected persons spread HIV to other partners, despite about 75,000 sex acts without condoms. 17 new infections over men who were healthy at the begging of the study. Tests shows that those infections were before the study began.

Jasmine holds a Master’s in Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto and writes professionally in a broad variety of genres. She has worked as a senior manager in public relations and communications for major telecommunication companies, and is the former Deputy Director for Media Relations with the Modern Coalition. Jasmine writes primarily in our LGBTTQQIAAP and Science section.